Section Anatomy and Medical Physiology

Section

What motivates people to study and teach? Academic education contains many obvious and hidden incentives meant to deliver, obtain, and progress knowledge.

This means that the extent to which educational interaction is effective will also depend on individual differences in preference and interest, as well as individual differences in the brain’s reward systems. We argue that a better understanding of basic motivational mechanisms can inform optimal, and possibly tailored, educational design.

Our research interests include:

we study educational motivation in the realm of health professions education. Settings include curricular teaching as well as post-graduate training and simulation;
we have a strong interest in:
a. Game-based learning, gamification in particular
b. Motivational psychology and typology
c. Teacher motivation
d. Neurobiological underpinnings of motivated behaviors;
we (intend to) study (educational) motivation using/through:
a. Qualitative methods
b. Mixed methods
c. Questionnaires
d. EEG and fMRI
e. E-learning and digital teaching applications.

Our Facilities

Relevance

Understanding motivation to bolster biomedical education

The quality of our health care strongly depends on the way we educate our health care professionals. We believe that a better understanding of how students and staff are motivated to study and teach will help improve educational design. In turn, we expect this to facilitate learning and teaching that is both more effective and more fun.